


Life After Life

by Caissa



Category: A Royal Affair (2012), A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams, Any Human Heart, Bleak House - Charles Dickens, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009), Hannibal (TV), The Fall (TV 2013)
Genre: 4 + 1 fic, Crossover, F/M, Hannibal Extended Universe, Just A Dream, Or Is It?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 10:41:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caissa/pseuds/Caissa
Summary: Four times Hannibal dreamed of sharing another life with Bedelia and one time she dreamed of him.





	Life After Life

The room he drifts through is dark and heavy—dark as mahogany is dark, heavy with the odor of smoke from a coal fire. It’s ornate and oppressive at once, a Victorian monstrosity of antimacassars and Aubusson carpets.

A lean man, cadverously thin, leads him to a polished walnut door. “Sir Leicester is concerned about his wife. She has been in low spirits lately. I would wager a case of hysteria—you know how women are.”

“I would prefer you leave the diagnosis to me.” The name comes to his lips, chalky and distasteful. “Mr. Tulkinghorn.”

Tulkinghorn rests a hand cautiously on the door. “I do hope if Lady Dedlock were to tell you anything of a…delicate nature…you would confide it to me first. After all, I am paying you a most handsome retainer for your services.”

The lawyer’s blind avarice galls him. Not much flesh on his bones but Hannibal is sure he could improvise something, a stew perhaps to soften him up. “My patient, if you please.”

She is waiting by the rain-streaked window. Her profile is elegant and finely boned, framed by rich chestnut hair, but her pallor in the dimly lit room puts him in mind of a rose that is fading.

“Lady Dedlock,” he greets her.

“I am told you are here to examine me.” She hides her face, not deigning to sit across from him. Her manner is haughty—she means to put him in his place. She is a lady after all and he little more than a tradesman in her eyes.

“Not examine, my lady. I prefer we start by merely…having conversations.”

A dark eyebrow arches at that and she turns to face him, truly looking at him for the first time. He looks into her eyes as she sits across from him. They are so familiar, that perfect ice water blue. How many afternoons had he spent looking into them as she unraveled his person suit, just a little. The hair is different, but the regal tilt of her nose, the sharp razor line of her cheekbones—he knows them. But her eyes are sad, so very sad.

She is Bedelia, but not Bedelia. And he is himself, but not himself at all. Such as the way it is in dreams.

“Could you describe your symptoms?” he prompts.

She studies him, face as tight and locked as a bank vault. “I am beyond your help, sir.”

“Let me be the judge of that.”

“Is it possible in your professional opinion for someone to die of boredom? For I fear I shall.” Her voice as she speaks is like a breeze through a graveyard.

His heart breaks for her. He can sense it, a secret buried so deeply inside it has consumed her year by year until only a living ghost remains. A silence so loud it has drowned out all speech. He knows it well. “Life is a banquet, my dear lady. And your husband and Mr. Tulkinghorn would have you starve to death at the feast.”

Her eyes widen, a shock of electric blue, as she grips his hand with her lace half glove. “You understand me. How?”

He pats her hand, raises it to his lips and kisses the very tips of her fingers, all the while thinking of a recipe for Brunswick stew. “It would be my honor to do you a favor, Lady Dedlock, and perhaps restore your lust for life.”

*

He is on a train—no, some kind of trolley. The air is syrupy with humidity and magnolia sweet. He feels a single bead of sweat roll down his neck. Dressed head to toe in pale crème and pink seersucker and still he is sweltering.

The trolley lurches to a halt and a woman climbs aboard, unsteady in her high heels, last season’s Donna Karan stained beneath the armpits with perspiration. He instinctively shoves aside so that she may sit.

“Please,” he gestures to the narrow space beside him.

She blinks; her eyes are a watery blue like the sea, her face coquettish—but it’s  _her_  again. The small blonde woman sidles up beside him. Her thigh brushes against his own; she smiles but does not withdraw it.

“Thank you, kind sir. We do not get many gentleman like you riding on this bumpy old streetcar named Desire.” Her voice is birdlike and raspy at once, affecting a girlishness that recalls debutante balls and plantations crumbling under the weight of kudzu. “What brings you to New Orleans?”

“I’m visiting a friend.” The lie comes easily—it’s not even technically a lie.

“A lady friend?”

“A gentleman never tells.”

His remark provokes a peal of laughter, as airy light as a fresh beignet. “I’m Blanche. Blanche DuBois,” she says through artfully downcast lashes. “It means  _white woods_.”

“I know,” he says, charmed in spite of himself. “Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

Her eyes go wide at the mention of his title and she snuggles even closer to him. “I could tell you were an educated and refined man, Dr. Lecter. I myself admire delicacy and tenderness in the male sex. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for my sister, who forces me to share an apartment with her brute of a husband, a Mr. Stanley Kowalski.” The shiver in her body when she pronounces the man’s name is no affectation. Miss Dubois is a fragile violet, her brother-in-law a gaping fist that yearns to crush.

“He sounds very rude,” Hannibal says, a sudden craving for gumbo gnawing at his belly.

“He  _is_ ,” Blanche spits.

The streetcar lurches to a sudden halt, nearly sending Miss DuBois into his lap. She extricates herself with a simpering blush and says, “This is my stop. Elysian Fields.” Dreamlike, he follows her down the narrow steps onto the dusty pavement. He doffs a hat to her, one he did not even realize he was wearing, and begins to walk in the opposite direction, a sense of foreboding creeping up his spine. He is indeed in a kind of underworld, though not one of his making.

“Who was that man you were talking to, Blanche?” he hears a woman ask.

“No one. Just a kind stranger.”

*

He meets her yet again. The time is not his own, nor the place. And he is not even himself, though he fills out the tailored tuxedo and white tie as if it were his own. But oh what a thrill to stand before the orchestra, to have them leap at his slightest touch, music coursing like a river underneath the arc of his baton. A flick of a wrist, a nod of his head sends the strings off into a frenzy, the woodwinds tumbling in a shrill cascade. He had felt power before surely, had created art, but never like this. Never on a stage, exposed for all to see, the hearts of his audience held captive in the palm of his hand.

It is not until the reception after that he sees her, spots her over the limned edge of his coupe of champagne, framed by courtiers on either side. With her sleek dark hair and witchy brown eyes she is more incongruous than ever, but it’s still  _her_  somehow. She calls his flesh to hers across the crowded ballroom. And he thinks, yes,  _yes_ , he’d gladly trade a kingdom for one night in her pale marble arms.

*

The last is so familiar, so disturbingly like his waking life. He is walking down the drab FBI corridors, the familiar décor a love note to Brutalism. Jack Crawford waves him over to where his team has gathered: Alana Bloom as pink cheeked and rosy as her namesake, Price, Katz, and Zeller thronging around like Macbeth’s three witches, and a sleek blonde head that does not belong here.

“Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, Metropolitan Police,” she says, crisp RP vowels rolling off her tongue. Her handshake is firm, her eyes even harder, coarsened perhaps by years as a woman in the domain of men.

“DSI Gibson is on loan to us from Scotland Yard, Dr. Lecter, and comes highly recommended,” Jack says by way of introduction. “We’ll be co-leading the Ripper investigation together.”

“The latest Ripper victim was a dual British citizen. And perhaps more importantly, nephew to the Home Secretary. We are under considerable pressure to see this resolved.”

“So, Scotland Yard has sent its best and brightest from across the pond,” he tells her. She does not acknowledge the compliment, or him at all, choosing to skim over the file in her hand.

“Where is Will Graham?” he asks.

“In hospital,” Stella says tersely. “He was burning with fever, clearly in no condition to be in the field.”

Alana steps forward with a guilty blush, shamed not to have caught Will’s illness sooner, eager to prove herself to their new guest. “As you can see from the file, the victim was missing both the thymus and pancreas—surgical trophies are a hallmark of the Ripper murders.”

“Many killers take trophies from their victims. They allow them to relive the high they get from their crimes, to reassert their dominance,” Stella says, pacing before the board of evidence, stiletto heels tapping in elegant counterpoint on the floor. She is cool and crisp, silky and smooth, the proverbial iron hand in a velvet glove. She is there standing in Will’s place but is as far away from Will as the moon is to the sun. He is mesmerized, enchanted, Merlin to her Nimue.

Suddenly, Stella stops, meditating quietly before photograph of his latest crime as one would before a Rothko. “I don’t think he’s keeping these trophies at all. At least not for long.”

“What do you mean, DSI Gibson?” Jack asks.

“Thymus and pancreas are sweetbreads. The other victims were missing their kidneys and liver.” She looks at him and her words fall straight from her lips like an arrow through his heart. “Your man’s not keeping his trophies—he’s eating them.”

He wakes covered in sweat, pulse racing significantly above his desired eighty-five beats per minute. He is relieved and bereft to know it was just a dream. When he closes his eyes and tries to sleep again he can still see the British detective’s blue gaze burning neon bright for him in the dark.

*

Bedelia’s poker face is very fine, as fine as his own, but there are tiny wrinkles of skepticism around her eyes today. It would appear that his recurring dreams of them together have finally stretched it to its breaking point.

“I was the Duchess of Windsor?” she asks, immaculate blonde eyebrow arching slightly northward.

“Yes, and I was Igor Stravinsky.” He rubs at his eyes, unusually fatigued. He is used to having more control over his own psyche—it is as if someone has added a Dadaist wing to his memory palace without his permission.

“Not Edward VIII, the one who abdicated,” she states, perfectly deadpan.

“No.”

Bedelia titters a bit, caught off guard by her own readiness to cast them as one of history’s great romances. She pauses, eyes traveling to the east of his head, the way she does when she is trying to summon insight out of the ether for him. “Freud believed that dreams were wishes. What are you wishing for, Hannibal?”

 _You_. The word rises to his throat from his heart, thick and syrupy. He chokes on it—he can’t tell her. “They are all so disparate, these dreams. No common thread, except you and I.”

Bedelia glances downward, smoothing her skirt. One of her tells, he has noticed, for when she feels vulnerable—ironing out the seams of her own person suit. “In several of these dreams you cast me as weak. You would have me be the distressed damsel.”

“No,” he replies quickly. “I don’t see you that way.”

“But you do feel protective of me,” Bedelia counters.

He has nothing to say to that. “The last one—Stella—was the hunter. Not the prey.”

“How did that make you feel?” It is a stock therapy line and there is a warm current of humor in her words as she speaks them.

“Bewitched.”

Bedelia’s eyes widen and an expression he’s never seen ghosts across her face. Dear God, she’s  _jealous_. “I suppose it is natural. Your psyche wishes to unite Will Graham and myself into one person, for the insights shared in therapy to be carried into your everyday life.”

“Perhaps,” he says quietly, still savoring the whiff of envy radiating from her like perfume. It spurs him onward, gives him one last jolt of courage. “Or perhaps my subconscious is simply telling me I want to be with you. In every age, in every lifetime.”

The professional mask Bedelia wears cracks open at the candor of his words, spoken from the heart. Her lips part and she makes to speak, but nothing comes. Finally, she says, “See you next week, Hannibal. And sweet dreams.”

*

 _Ridiculous_ , Bedelia thinks as she climbs into bed alone later that night. She’d spent the better part of an hour discussing multiple worlds theory and quantum mechanics with Hannibal this afternoon. Transference was to be expected, but her psychiatry residency had not prepared her for a patient who believed her to be Wallis Simpson reincarnated.

Sleep washes over her gradually like a gentle tide bearing her out to sea. And suddenly she’s not in Baltimore, not in the past or the present at all. Heavy silk skirts pool around her ankles and a tight corset constricts her frame. A gilded door opens as if by magic. And behind it, Hannibal, dressed like the hero on the cover of a paperback romance. He outstretches his hand to her and they begin to dance...

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by the Kate Atkinson novel of the same name which is sort of a groundhog day imagining of one woman's life and the type of prose I could only dream of imagining. 
> 
> I couldn't pick just one Mads/Gillian crossover so I wrote them all. Ooops.


End file.
